Professor Plans Homes That Can Monitor Residents

Imagine if the walls of your house could talk–and tell you things like who keeps forgetting to turn off the hallway lights, or how many times has your family eaten dinner together in the last month? Kamin Whitehouse is building software to do just that.

The University of Virginia associate professor is leading a team that designed a system–enabled by sensors installed in wall panels and other places in the home–to let users monitor the activities of household members and analyze their behavior.

Many companies in Silicon Valley have talked about connected devices, such as smart refrigerators that keep track of the location and expiration dates of food. But Whitehouse, who described his research at the MIT Technology Review Summit in San Francisco, thinks it’s more interesting to monitor people than objects.

The sensors in his system can be programmed to identify and track individuals in a household by recording how tall they are. Right now, Whitehouse’s team is using the system to zero in on energy use, linking residents’ actions to things like how often appliances are used or water is left running.

So the system could enable users to figure out things like who takes the longest showers, leaves the lights on, or spends the most time in the kitchen. It also could be used to monitor how often elderly people move or eat during the day, Whitehouse said.

“The walls of the house literally become a sensing substrate to understand the people that are in them,” Whitehouse said of the software, which he named the Maurader’s Map, after a magical all-seeing map in Harry Potter novels.

Whitehouse didn’t discuss privacy issues in his talk at the event Monday. But it isn’t hard to imagine his software creating or exacerbating tension within families, say, if one member of the family didn’t want to be tracked by the others–or if such a system was used without the knowledge of household members.

But Whitehouse said he would expect the system to remove tension in households.

“Tension is sometimes created when people leave the lights on or browse the refrigerator with the door open, even though these behaviors actually constitute only a small fraction of the home’s total energy waste,” he said in an email.

“Detailed energy analytics would help households take concrete actions to fix the dominant causes of energy consumption, such as heating, cooling, the pool pump, and so on,” he said.

Whitehouse added that the system could also help roommates negotiate their energy bills, by giving each household members a clear breakdown of each person’s consumption.

He said he was testing the program in four households. Currently, the program runs on both a mobile app and a desktop browser.